What should our children be taught?

Fifty years ago on Christmas day when Archibald Macleish saw the first photographs of the Earth taken from the moon he wrote, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night”. Educating our children to focus on this truth is our only hope for building a safer world so that, as a species, we don’t follow the dinosaurs.

Over the last decade or so as teenage suicides and child-against-child violence began to rise, a question has repeated itself: on the road called academic excellence, did we, somewhere, sometime, take a wrong turning? The few million Indian children who are privileged to attend school are in a system that concentrates on developing only their mental faculties and pays little attention to their imaginative, creative sides. That inner space which needs emotional training, where feelings rise and are handled (or not), is a vacant plot waiting to be filled by anarchic forces and ideas based on ignorance and prejudice.

The wider backdrop of our attempts is made up of the five problematic intersections of our country’s caste-class-gender-language and religious differences; the immediate backdrop of our attempts is a ferocious run up to a set of examinations that judges children as bright or dull, smart or slow. To this, add the breakdown of the safety network of joint families and neighbourhood affinities, the rise of a blatant and gross phantom world created by an entertainment industry which glamorizes violence and what do we get? In Krishna Kumar’s words, an atmosphere pretty close to a training–ground in warfare. And in whose hands are they? Anxious overworked parents, tense and irritable, carrying their workplace into their homes and vice-versa.

Who can blame them? Ask not of a man (or woman) what s/he hath not to give. The one thing they cannot give is time.

“Hurry up and get it right or you will fail!” is the home-cry of the 21st century exactly like, “Don’t fight with your brothers and sisters!” was the 20th century’s. Fail at what? These parents are not referring to a failure to be a considerate human being but failure in a system which was not designed to place much value on the humanity of the child. But it is time to rethink because disruptions too numerous to list have endangered the child’s mental equilibrium. In most middle-class homes today, there is hardly a sister or brother to grow up with since most children below the age of 12 are their parents’ only offspring. While there are more toys and food for this single child the greatest danger to his or her emotional safety lies not so much outside the home (people are no more terrible or noble than they always were) as inside it. In nearly every home there is tremendous parental pressure on school-going children to succeed in class and on the playing field. The child is extremely vulnerable to these continuous and

stressful reproaches especially because it also comes confusingly couched in genuine parental affection.

The other side of the child’s life lies in school where—with rare exceptions—the training to look no further than the self and academic success is so intense that the spiritual side of the child is completely neglected. Without a doubt their teachers (mostly between the ages of 30-55) have no experience to fall back on because in their childhood years, technology and the pace of life were not where they are today. Therefore, they have very few norms to measure the newgen against and the children in their care are, for the most part, entirely unpredictable. The child also learns to be hard on himself which gradually builds stress and anger, fear and feelings of inadequacy—all ingredients that can easily lead to an emotional brink.

In short, “in our days…” is a phrase we can lock away forever.

Filled with disappointments, fear, aggression because his emotions have no chance of expression in schoolrooms and because there is no space for the many things he would like to discuss and needs to, a dangerous space in the child begins to grow. The worst casualty is the sense of fellowship with classmates and friends because the culture of getting ahead turns every classmate into a rival. Since this is not very different from how the youngest, speediest and most powerful animal gets the most food or the best mate, how far have we travelled from the jungle?

If one of the stated goals of Indian education is the removal of prejudices and the instilling of peace and understanding in young children who are growing up in a country where structured violence is becoming increasingly common, the philosophy of education for India should reflect this and include a programme which ensures also moral growth. We can call it what we like: Values education, peace education, ethics education, anti-bias education…. Who will protest if the government puts forward a plan to nurture a child’s personality growth with the underpinning themes of mutual understanding and communal harmony?

How do we build a safer world?

Since there is no zone where children are not tested and arduously and stressfully grilled for one thing or another, who succeeds? The toughest test-taker, the one with the strongest memory. Perhaps not the most sensitive, the gentle children, the ones who by nature notice the discomfort of others. Why? Because the overall message is that one must smash through competition and succeed no matter what the cost. Thus, habits of thinking violently are put in place very early in life.

What is Values Education?

We must position counselling and mentoring for the growth of a human being. Not just a wage earner. What are we telling the next generation about how to groom themselves into becoming responsible young citizens? Are we telling them how to overcome competition or that the safety and security of one lies in the progress of all? Who is a true leader? Is honesty the best policy? How is strength best expressed? Is a frog as important as a mango tree? Is it all right for a street child to starve and be illiterate when each child in the classes we teach has at least one car? Are there no moral issues when farmlands are destroyed for luxurious holiday resorts and apartments blocks to be built? When today’s ten-year-olds grow up and look at an environmentally impoverished planet will they realise that it is but an outward expression of mindscapes ruined by a loss of our collective conscience?

We already know how to raise a healthy child. We need to now concentrate on finding out if it is possible to train a child to grow up to be a kind and truthful. It is true that we cannot reverse history, we cannot block social and global economic trends, but we must have a counter strategy that builds a humanistic perspective.

Do we not all know that a happy and emotionally stable child is also a better student?

Mini Krishnan is Series Editor, Living in Harmony (OUP India)